A grandnephew of the emperor Franz Joseph, Charles became heir presumptive to the Habsburg throne upon the assassination of his uncle Franz Ferdinand (June 28, 1914), whose children were barred from succession because of his morganatic marriage. After his accession, Charles, a peace-loving man, made attempts to take Austria-Hungary out of World War I through secret overtures to the Allied powers, the most promising being through his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus von Bourbon-Parma. All failed, largely because the emperor refused to cede any territories to Italy. Because he had also supported French claims to Alsace-Lorraine, his reputation both in Germany and at home suffered when his efforts were made public.

World War I accelerated the centrifugal forces of nationalism in Charles’s multinational empire. His solution, transformation of the western part of his empire into a federated state, announced in October 1918, proved insufficient and too late. On November 11, 1918, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian armies on the Italian front, Charles renounced all participation in affairs of state but did not abdicate. Exiled to Switzerland in March 1919, he was deposed by the Austrian parliament that April. In 1921 he twice tried to regain his Hungarian throne but failed and was sent to exile in Madeira, living there in very poor conditions and dying of pneumonia.

Upon Charles’s death in 1922, his widow, Zita von Bourbon-Parma (1892–1989), went into mourning and wore black for the rest of her life, dying at age 96 in Switzerland.

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in 20th-century international relations

...a way out of the German alliance. The new Habsburg foreign minister, the Polish Ottokar, Graf Czernin, raised the issue of war aims and peace at his first ministerial meeting with the new emperor, Charles. A negotiated peace could only be one without victors or vanquished, conquests or indemnities—so said Czernin 10 days before Wilson’s own “Peace Without Victory” speech. The...

...countering French influence among the successor states. In 1920 the French even courted Hungary and toyed with the idea of resurrecting a Danubian Confederation, but when the deposed Habsburg King Charles appeared in Hungary in March 1921, Allied protests and a Czech ultimatum forced him back into exile. Hungarian revisionism, however, motivated Beneš to unite those states that owed...

On November 21, 1916, Franz Joseph died, leaving the throne and the shaky empire to his 29-year-old grandnephew, Charles (I), who had had little preparation for his task until he became heir apparent on the death of Franz Ferdinand. Full of the best intentions, Charles set out to save the monarchy by searching for peace in foreign affairs and by recognizing the rights of the empire’s non-German...